is a British independent video game development company headquartered in Walsall,England founded in March 2009 by Garry Newman. The company is most known for its sandbox video gamesGarry's Mod and Rust.

Description

History

Facepunch Studios was originally developed under the partnership of Garry Newman, Matthew Schwenk, Bryn Shurman, and Arthur Lee for the video game Facewound, in 2003. The group adopted Facepunch Studios as a company name to avoid looking "unprofessional"; and to further the development of their side scroller, the Facepunch forum was also established.

The name "Facepunch" came from the brainstorming of names for the game Facewound - where something "stupidly macho" was required. Two names were chosen at the end: Facepunch and Facewound. Facewound was used for the game, but Facepunch was deemed "too funny sounding to just leave to die" - and so was used as the name for the company.

In 2004, Garry Newman started the development of Garry's Mod, originally a side project; which eventually took over the Facewound forum as well as most of Newman's time. Facewound was later postponed and cancelled, and Facepunch Studio disbanded. Garry's Mod has become the flagship game of Facepunch Studios, and as of November 2013, the game has sold 3.5 million copies, regularly being one of the top played Steam games, having been released near Steam's inception.

The studio has 20 employees working on Rust and five people are working on prototypes like Deuce or Space Game.

On September 24, 2014, Garry Newman acquired Before and the developer working on it, Bill Lowe.

Garry's Mod

Garry Newman has not been formally trained in code. Garry's Mod started out as a sandbox mode for tinkering in Valve's Source engine. Not truly considered a video game, and more of a playground, the game takes assets from Valve's own video games like Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, etc., and allows users to pose them with different tools offered by Garry's Mod. As of September 2014 the game has sold 6 million copies. As of January 2016 the game has sold 10 million copies.

Rust

Rust is an online multiplayer survival game, based on games such as Minecraft and DayZ. Rust's inception stemmed from Facepunch's frustration with DayZ's gameplay; inheriting its cruel player versus player model and Minecraft's crafting and building aspects. Rust's grand concept was to develop a game where the players would be able to mold the environment: hunting, scavenging, gathering, and looting for survival; and players themselves impeding or assisting each other's success.

Although the game has been criticized for being too brutal, Facepunch Studios has iterated that an artificial scoreboard, encouraging player to "play nice", would be to the detriment of the game: "There shouldn't be a system hanging around forcing people to be good. It removes a lot of gameplay fun." Instead the company opted to implement voice chat; keeping players from shooting each other on sight, out of fear.

Rust's sold over 150,000 copies in two weeks, compared to Garry's Mod, which only sold 34,000 in two weeks. As of 23 May 2014, more than 1.6 million total copies have been sold, making more than US$46.5 million in total. As of 24 December 2015, sales have surpassed over 3 million. Rust is still in alpha.

Before

On September 24, 2014 Garry Newman announced that Facepunch Studios would be taking on Before to develop. Before is being created by Bill Lowe under the company.